Socialism Claimed Millions: Now It's Coming for America

In this episode of The Marc Little Show, Marc Little takes a hard look at socialism—what it is, why it’s gaining ground, and what history says happens when governments take control of the economy, culture, and daily life. From Venezuela and Cuba to the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Zimbabwe, Marc argues that socialism consistently concentrates power, erodes freedom, and leaves ordinary people paying the price.

He also tackles one of the biggest arguments in the debate: whether the Bible supports socialism. Drawing from Acts, Second Thessalonians, and broader Scripture, Marc explains why the early church’s voluntary generosity is not the same as government redistribution, and why the church has a responsibility to lead with truth, stewardship, and action.

If you’re searching for a Christian perspective on socialism, a conservative take on government control, or a biblical response to economic justice debates, this episode delivers a direct, urgent warning. Marc closes with a call for the church to speak up, serve the vulnerable, and resist political ideologies that trade freedom for power.

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Transcript

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They are calling it a movement. They're calling it progress. They are calling it the future. What their selling has a name. And that name has a history. And that history is written in the suffering of millions of people who believe the same promises you're being sold right now. Socialism is not new. It is not brave. It is not kind. It's a lie. Dressed up in the language of compassion. Sound familiar? Democrats? Sold by politicians who have figured out that hopeless people will vote for anyone who promises them relief. Today on this program, we're going to talk about what socialism actually is. We're going to name the names of the people pushing it in this country right now. We're going to go look at what it has done everywhere it has ever been tried. And then we're going to talk about the church. Because the church does have a role to play in this moment. And too many churches are playing the wrong one. This, my friends, is the Mark Little Show. I am Mark Little, I'm your host. I'm a pastor, I'm a lawyer, and a political commentator. And we'll be right back. Welcome back. This is the Mark Little Show. I am Mark Little. I'm your host. I'm a pastor, a lawyer, and a political commentator. Today's episode: Socialism in Unalived Millions. Now it's coming for America. What is socialism? Socialism is an economic system where the government controls the major resources of a country. The factories, the land, the hospitals, the schools, sometimes the food. And in its most extreme form, nearly everything. The government decides who gets what. The government decides how much you earn. The government decides what your child learns in school. The government decides what kind of health care you receive and when you receive it. That sounds frightening when you say it. Or at least it should. So the people who promote it, they don't tell you the truth. They use soft words. They say equity. They say tax the rich. They say economic justice. They use the word free. They love that word. Here's what you need to understand about the word free. Nothing is free. You even think there's no price for you to pay. That's a lie. Someone always pays. The only question socialism answers differently is this. Who decides who pays? And who gets paid? And the answer is always the same. The government decides. And whoever controls the government controls everything. That's not freedom. Even if you like free stuff, it's not freedom. That's the oldest form of government ever invented. Socialism does not come to your door announcing itself. It comes to your door announcing itself as a solution to your pain. The pain is real. There are working people in this very country who are exhausted. People working two jobs and they still can't pay rent. People who went to college the way they were told to, took on the debt they were told was an investment. And they came out the other side with a degree that doesn't even cover the interest on what they borrowed. People who watched corporations get bailed out by government while they got left behind. That was not so long ago. That pain of witnessing that inequity is real. And it deserves to be taken seriously. But here is what the socialist politicians do with that pain. They don't try to solve it. That's where you've been misled. They harvest it. They walk into communities where people feel forgotten. And they say, The system is rigged against you. And I'm the one who'll tear it down and build something better. Vote for me. People who are desperate enough. People who feel like nothing else has worked, they listen. That is not leadership. It's called exploitation. And the people doing it know exactly what they're doing. Zohan Mandami, a thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist, born in Uganda, who just became the mayor of New York City. He ran on city-owned grocery stores, fare-free buses, aggressive rent control, and higher taxes on the wealthy. And he won. He is now governing the largest city in America on an openly socialist platform. That's not a warning about what's coming. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, United States, representative from New York, former Starbucks Barista, one of the most prominent voices in Congress for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and free college tuition. She is a member of the Democrat Socialists of America. Don't forget about Bernie, Bernie Sanders, United States Senator from Vermont. He has run for president twice and could have won if they hadn't cheated on an openly socialist platform. At least the primary could have won. And days after his wedding, he traveled to the Soviet Union as part of an official delegation and later called it his very strange honeymoon. He's praised Cuba's revolution and lauded its health care and education system while dismissing the government's political prisoners as proof that Cuba was simply not a perfect society. He spent decades telling the American people that what we need is a political revolution modeled on governments that have devastated millions of lives. These people, they're not evil, they're just wrong. Dangerously wrong. And the ideas that they are promoting, they have a track record. That track record should settle the argument. Someone listening right now is already forming the objection. Sanders is not Lenin. Ocasio-Cortez is not Castro. Those are communist regimes. Socialism and communism are different things, they would argue. If that's what you just said, keep listening. There is a spectrum. I'll grant you that. But every communist regime in history passed through socialism first. Marx himself described communism as the final stage of socialism. The road has a direction, friends, and it always arrives at the same destination. The difference between socialism and communism is not the destination. It's how fast you get there. Don't let them fool you. Venezuela, twenty years ago. It had the largest proven oil reserves in the world. It was one of the wealthiest countries in South America. Then Hugo Chavez came to power, promoting to redistribute that wealth. He nationalized the oil industry. He seized private farms and businesses. He built a government that controlled nearly everything. The Living Conditions Survey, conducted by three major Venezuelan universities. The Central University of Venezuela, the Andres Bello Catholic University, and Simon Bolívar University, found that 74.3% of the Venezuelan population lost an average of nineteen pounds in a single year because there was not enough food. That survey has been corroborated by CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and the Associated Press. Millions of Venezuelans have fled the country. Corruption is not the exception there. It's the system. Cuba. The Castro Revolution promised health care and education for everyone. What it delivered was a one-party state where political dissent is a crime, where the internet is restricted. The healthcare system that socialism's defenders just love to celebrate is a two-tiered system. One tier for foreigners and communist party members. The other tier, with crumbling hospitals and scarce medicine for everyone else. The people of Cuba have been risking their lives to leave for over sixty years. What a tragedy. Now for the Soviet Union, the great socialist experiment of the twentieth century. Seventy years, tens of millions dead, not from war alone, but from famines engineered by government policy, from gulags, from the systematic destruction of anyone who refused to comply. The Soviet Union did not collapse because of external pressure alone. It collapsed because socialism at scale over time always collapses. You can't run an economy by political command. When you remove the incentive to work like they did during COVID, to create, to build, people stop working. They stop creating, they stop building. How about North Korea? That's the most complete socialist state on earth today. A country where the government controls every aspect of life, where Christianity is a capital offense, where an estimated a hundred thousand or more people are held in political prison at any given time. The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has documented this extensively. North Korea is what happens when socialism reaches its logical conclusion with no resistance. Oh, let's not forget about Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe came to power, promising land redistribution and economic justice for black Zimbabweans who had been dispossessed under colonial rule, and it was true. The injustice he was responding to indeed was real. But the socialist solution he imposed destroyed one of the most productive agricultural economies on the continent of Africa. Zimbabwe went from being called the breadbasket of Africa to experiencing hyperinflation so severe that the government eventually printed one hundred trillion dollar bills that were almost worth nothing. Corruption consumed everything. Morality was hollowed out. And the people who were promised liberation, they suffered the most. This is the pattern. It's not a coincidence. Socialism concentrates power. Concentrated power corrupts. And the people who pay the price are never the lying politicians. They're always the people the politicians claimed to be helping. We're talking today about socialism. What it is, who is selling it, and what it has cost everywhere it has ever been tried. We'll be right back. I'm your host today's topic: socialism with a lived millions. Now it's coming for America. That, my friends, is a true statement. It's not hyperbole. And there are pastors and theologians and pulpits around the world today who are using the Bible to justify socialism. They point to the early church described in the book of Acts and say, see, the first Christians shared everything. That is socialism. The Bible supports it. That argument does not hold up. Here is what Acts actually says. Acts chapter 2, verses 44 and 45. It says there, all the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own. But they shared everything they had. Who sold their possessions? The believers. Voluntarily. They moved by the Holy Spirit. Out of love for one another. No government compelled them. No politician taxed them. No bureaucrat redistributed their goods. They gave because they were transformed people, living in genuine community, responding to the spirit of God. That's not socialism. That's the church being the church. Socialism says the government will take what you have and give it to whom the government decides. The early church said, we'll give what we have to whom the Spirit directs. Those are not the same thing. They're not even close to the same thing. And then there's Paul. It says there, if a man will not work, he shall not eat. Paul wrote that to a church community where some people had stopped working because they believed Christ's return was so imminent that work no longer mattered. Paul corrected them sharply. Work is not optional. Contribution is not optional. Dependency without effort is not a biblical value. Socialism's entire economic architecture depends on the idea that the state owes you a living, regardless of contribution. Paul says no. The early church says no. The whole of Scripture says no. Liberation theology was developed in the nineteen sixties, and most prominently by a Peruvian Catholic priest named Gustavo Gutierrez, and later adapted for the American context by James Cohn, who called it Black Liberation Theology. The core claim of liberation theology is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is primarily a message of political and economic liberation for the oppressed. And that the church's mission is to participate in the revolutionary transformation of unjust social structures. The concern for the poor that drives liberation of theology is not wrong. Jesus was absolutely clear about our obligation to the poor. Matthew chapter 25, Luke chapter 4, the prophets. Scripture is not silent about economic injustice. But liberation of theology does not stop at concern for the poor. It reframes the entire gospel as a political. Program. It subordinates the call to personal salvation, repentance, and transformation to a call for structural revolution. And its most explicit forms, it baptizes Marxist class analysis and calls it theology. That is not the gospel. That is Marx with a cross on top. The pain and history that made liberation of theology appealing to people who had been genuinely oppressed is real. The answer to a corrupt system is not a different corrupt system with theological language attached to it. The answer is the unchanging gospel of Jesus Christ, which transforms people and transformed people, built just communities, not the other way around. The church that trades the gospel for a political program, any political program, has lost the only thing it had that the world cannot replicate. Socialism is not coming. It's here. It's in the language of our politicians, it's in our universities. It's showing up in our school curricula. It is in some of our pulpits. And the people most vulnerable to its appeal are the people the church is called to serve. The church must be the answer it is calling government to be. If people in your community are hungry, feed them. If families are being crushed by debt, come alongside them. If young people have no vision for their future, give them one. The appeal of socialism is loudest when the church has been silent and absent. Our absence created the vacuum. We do not get to be surprised that something filled it. The church must teach economic theology, stewardship, that's what it's called. Work as worship. The dignity of human labor, the difference between charity freely given and redistribution imposed by force. These are not political opinions, they're biblical convictions. And they need to be taught from the pulpit without apology. The church must engage the culture without becoming the culture. That means pastors who will say from the pulpit what needs to be said, even when it costs them. It means congregations who understand that silence in the face of a lie is not neutrality. It's complicity. The church must vote. The church in America has the numbers to shape every election at every level. When the church stays home, the people who want to expand government into every corner of your life do not stay home. They show up and they win. For those of you listening who may not share my faith, this still applies to you. You do not have to be a Christian to recognize that every country that has tried socialism has ended up with less freedom, more corruption, more poverty, and more suffering than it started with. That's not a religious argument. That's history. The politicians selling you socialism, they're not poor. They're not hungry. They are not standing in the lines they're asking you to accept. They're asking you to trade your freedom for their power. And they are counting on your pain being loud enough that you will not stop to ask whether what they are offering has actually worked. It has not. Not once, not twice, not anywhere. Do not let your pain be someone else's political currency. You deserve better. You deserve better than that. Your family deserves better than that. And this country, with all of its flaws and history and all of its unfinished business, deserves better than that. I am Mark Little. This has been the Mark Little Show. I've been your host. I'm a pastor, I'm a lawyer, I'm a political commentator. I'm asking you today to do your homework. Don't let your pain dictate how you vote. Let the truth of what you're being sold be the litmus test. God bless.